by Helen Wells
Muriel wailed. It was earlier than her usual bedtime.
Her father said pleasantly, “Grandmother and Miss Cherry and I have grown-up things to talk over. I would consider it real co-operation on your part if you said good night now, like a good child.”
“Good night,” chirped Muriel promptly. Grabbing Lilac’s collar, she planted a kiss on her father’s ear and skipped off to bed.
Cherry and Mark Grainger chatted, stiffly, while Mrs. Eldredge put Muriel to bed.
“Is your arm improving?”
“Yes, thanks. It wasn’t too bad. I can’t believe our enemy could keep an Englishman down permanently! And our local physician is very competent.”
“I—er—was wondering how you got home from the air base the other day, in your weakened condition.”
Mark Grainger coolly settled into his chair. “I thumbed my way, as you Americans say, in a jeep. Sorry to have strolled out on you without offering my thanks. I was rather in a hurry.”
“I can imagine,” Cherry said dryly.
“With that urgent report, you know.”
“No, I don’t know!”
“Well, here is Mother Eldredge. I’ll start at the beginning.”
The three of them pulled their chairs closer together in front of the fireplace, for this conversation was not to be overheard by any passers-by. Cherry saw how taut and anxious the elderly woman was. Cherry herself was waiting tensely for what might be coming. She was determined to listen to whatever Mark Grainger would say, both with good will and a critical ear for lies.
His very first words, delivered with conviction and offered with proof, filled her with relief.
“I am not a spy. I am not working for the Germans. I am working for Britain, for the Allied cause, in the British Intelligence—and have been all along. Here is proof.” He rose, and with difficulty reached behind the clock. He brought out a letter and showed it to them. The letter, indubitably authentic and signed by two high personages, confirmed what he said. Mark Grainger sat down again, smiling now.
Cherry and Mrs. Eldredge could only gasp.
“But, Mark,” Mrs. Eldredge said in amazement, “what could have been your reason to keep silent while all those horrible charges were being made against you?”
Mark Grainger smoothed his blond hair. “When I tell you the whole story, you will see why I needed, and still need, to keep silence. Why I am unable to defend myself against cries of ‘Spy!’ I am telling you only because Miss Ames has jeopardized her military standing, though I am also glad to have this opportunity to relieve your mind, Mother Eldredge. Please understand that you must keep this secret, for my work must go on.”
Mrs. Eldredge and Cherry both promised.
“You know that in the countries the Germans have occupied—France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, parts of Russia, Norway, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Greece—there are brave people who will not submit to Germans coming into their countries and ruling them. You also know that if patriots were to defy their invaders openly, they would be shot, and so would not be able to accomplish anything against the enemy. So they have to resist the Germans secretly.
“On the surface they seem to obey. But secretly they have organized an underground. It is extremely dangerous, as you can imagine. This underground does work of the greatest importance to the Allied armies—supplies information about the enemy that helps us win battles. And, of course, our winning battles means that we will be able to drive the Germans out of the occupied countries, and free these people to rule themselves.”
“I understand,” Cherry murmured.
“My work is with the underground,” Mark Grainger explained. “You know that I am an engineer. I also happen to speak German and French, fluently. So I was assigned to Belgium, to get in touch secretly with Belgian patriots working for the underground. My task was to learn such things from them as—well, I cannot tell you in much detail. But here are some examples: I was to learn, under the noses of the Germans in Belgium, where the German robot bomb factories were hidden, so that our bombing planes could blow them up. Sometimes, too, we would smuggle out captured Allied soldiers, so they could fight again. Or sometimes we would secretly bring a Belgian into England, train him in intelligence work, and take him back to work for his underground.”
“Fantastic,” Mrs. Eldredge said. “Fantastic.”
“The whole war is fantastic,” Mark replied. “The idea of so-called civilized people killing off one another is fantastic, isn’t it?”
Cherry’s mind was teeming with questions. She hardly knew where to start. “But how did you get from England to Belgium without the enemy knowing?”
“By Army plane. I dropped into German-occupied Belgium by parachute, at night, usually, to lessen the chance of being caught. Sometimes I would wear a uniform and on occasion I would wear civilian clothes.”
Suddenly to Cherry’s mind came vividly the picture of Mark Grainger, dressed in shabby civilian clothes, furtively loitering around the special plane.
“So that’s why I once saw you loitering about a plane on that air strip!” Cherry blurted out.
Mark started. “You saw me? Recognized me? And you didn’t report me?”
“No, I did not report you then. I gave you the benefit of the doubt.”
The young man leaned back in his chair once more. “Thank heavens for that! If you had spoken, you might have undone months of perilous work. When you saw me, I had just come in by plane. I was trying to get away unnoticed, for not even Army people could know my work. Thank you, Miss Ames. Thank you for having had some faith in me.”
“But, Mr. Grainger,” Cherry started to say when Mrs. Eldredge began to weep softly. “Oh, Mark! Oh, Mark!” she cried, “it was hard to have faith in you at times. Those telephone calls in German—your visitors in the middle of the night—and then that note—”
“I realize your position, Mother Eldredge,” Mark said gently. “Believe me, I never once felt any reproach toward you for your suspicions. What else could you think? We had to use German, here in England, to keep our English neighbors from learning our work. You know how gossip spreads, and this work must be kept secret! If we had used English in England, people would have understood; if French, they could have guessed. No, we had to use German to put them off the scent. By the way, I was amused when the neighbors reported me to Scotland Yard. I’ve been working with Scotland Yard. Naturally the neighbors received no answer when they reported me. But it hurt when they made my little girl feel that—being loyal to her father was wrong.”
Mrs. Eldredge twisted her veined hands. “I’m afraid that I, too, made the child unhappy by my suspicious attitude.”
Mark reached over and gave her a reassuring pat on the hand. Then he turned his handsome, strong face to Cherry. “And, Miss Ames,” he smiled gently, “I realize your position, too, it was your duty to report me when you did.”
Cherry was startled.
“So General Headquarters has contacted you?” Cherry asked.
“Yes, Miss Ames. Your Commanding Officer knows all the facts on the case.” Cherry felt some sense of relief. At least it was established that Mark was not a spy; that he was doing invaluable work for the Allies. But it did not clear her part in the situation, she knew. She had broken regulations, and she would be punished. Mark continued, “I’m indebted to you, Miss Ames, for all you have done, and for reassuring Muriel and protecting her. You softened her troubles for her. I know of no way to tell you what that means to me. I am in your debt for a great deal! For bringing me home the other day—”
“How did you usually return from Belgium to England?”
“As best I could. Sometimes it was possible to make arrangements beforehand, sometimes I simply had to rely on my wits and luck. You realize I could not just get aboard any Allied plane, for no one except a high Intelligence officer was to know my identity and work. And it is not always possible, in battle, to locate the highest-ranking Intelligence officer for clearance. I did not
dare carry any valid written identification, no written messages—nothing. All the information that I secured had to be memorized and kept locked in my head. If I had been caught, you see, with written proof, not only I, but innocent people in the underground would have been shot.”
They sat for a moment brooding over his danger-filled existence.
Cherry asked hesitantly, “May I ask how you knew which people were members of the underground?”
Mark laughed a little. “Since we have now changed the method, I can tell you. Well, in the first place, no underground worker ever knows more than two or three other members. So that, in case one is caught, he or she cannot possess much information to be tortured out of him. Few of them ever talk, anyway. In these last few months, I worked with two men and a woman. Belgians. Just everyday people like you and me, who loved their country and wanted to get the Germans out of it. There were Germans everywhere in Belgium. We had to have some sort of signal which the Germans would not suspect. So we agreed we would whistle or sing an old, familiar German song, under the enemy’s very nose.”
“The song Muriel sang for me? Röslein?”
“Yes. Perhaps I was indiscreet to teach her that song, but it—it meant so very much to me.”
“It meant your life,” Mrs. Eldredge said simply. “And the silver medal with the rose?” Cherry asked. Mark Grainger’s face clouded. He seemed to be seeing another land, other scenes. “That medal had its part in saving my life. The woman underground member gave it to me—partly to augment the song signal and identify me to someone in a new area of Belgium where I was going, partly as a good luck piece. I got safely into the new territory, but the Germans picked me up. It looked bad for me. But because I had in my possession this medal stamped Berlin, which only a pro German was likely to own—since it was an old and typically German school trophy—I could say I had gone to school in Germany, and they let me go. It really turned out to be my good luck charm, you see.”
“And you gave it to Muriel,” Cherry said softly.
Mark Grainger’s brow furrowed. He talked into the fire. “It had kept me safe. I felt that perhaps it would keep her safe, too, from the robot bombs. And besides—If I had never come back, I wanted Muriel to have something of her father. I wanted her to have some sign, even if she did not understand it, of what her father had been doing.”
“She will know, some day,” Mrs. Eldredge said in a choked voice, “that her father was no spy but the bravest of patriots!”
Mark smiled wryly. “Until that day comes, I will have to go on permitting my name to be blackened. Muriel will continue to hear only bad of me. She must simply have faith in her father.”
Cherry leaned forward to him. “I think she will.”
They smiled at each other.
Cherry said eagerly, “Could we bring her in and tell her a little of this—just a little—to relieve her worry, and yours.”
Mark Grainger stood up. “Yes! Yes! You’re right. I’ll get her.”
He came back leading the sleepy child by the hand. She was rosy from sleep and smiled vaguely at Cherry. Mark sat down and held her on his lap.
“You tell her, Miss Cherry. You’ve kept up her faith in me so far.”
Cherry took Muriel’s small warm hands in her own.
“Can you keep a very big secret? For your father’s safety?”
Muriel nodded, wide-eyed.
“Well, here’s the secret. No matter what anybody says against your father, I know, and your grandmother knows, and you know—that it isn’t true! We must not say so now. But after the war is over, everybody will find out Muriel’s father is a real hero.”
Muriel blinked sleepily. “I always thought he was a hero anyway. But you mean, when Mr. Heath says my father is ‘no good’—or Tony and Meg say he’s a spy—it isn’t true?”
Her grandmother said emphatically, “It absolutely is not true!” She added, “But we still have to pretend we don’t know anything about it.”
Muriel heaved a great sigh. “Oh, I’m terribly glad. I never b’lieved those mean things about you, Father, but sometimes Lilac and I felt quite hurt. I guess we won’t any more. Just pretend, mm? Just pretend.”
She was smiling happily and clinging to her father’s hand as he led her back to bed. When Mark Grainger returned, they conversed a little longer. Cherry asked Mark Grainger why he had chosen this perilous work.
“Why did you choose to become a flight nurse?” he countered, laughing. “That isn’t precisely a safe or easy job.”
Cherry smiled back. “Oh—I don’t exactly know. I’ve long since forgotten I had a choice to make. Feels now as if I’d been chosen.”
“That’s how I feel.”
“I’ve never experienced such satisfaction as comes from helping a soldier through his suffering.”
Mark nodded. “Or helping brave, persecuted people fight for their freedom.”
Mrs. Eldredge really smiled, for the first time that quietly momentous evening. “You two are rather two of a kind, aren’t you?”
Cherry rose to go. Mark Grainger offered to see her at least as far as High Street but she refused because he was still weak. Good-byes were said, and the British family’s thanks proffered again.
“Come back to England after we’ve chased the Jerries away,” they called after Cherry as she went down the path. “Then we’ll really repay you.”
Cherry waved, and shut the gate. She took what was to be her last look at that almost enchanted white cottage.
CHAPTER X
Mission Home
“GET UP! WAKE UP!” ANN WAS LAUGHING AND SHAKING them. “Wake up this minute!”
The Flight Three girls rolled out wearily. In the men’s long, woolen GI underwear which they wore these cold months as pajamas, they were a sight to behold.
“It’s not six A.M. yet,” Cherry groaned.
Gwen was sitting up with her eyes shut. “Ann, how can you do this to me?”
Ann, fully dressed and awake, ripped Aggie’s covers back. “Get up! Jack arrived half an hour ago! And he’s already got permission and we’re to be married today! Get up and help the bride!”
“Hurray for you!” Cherry cried. “Hurray for love!” She bounced off her bed and seized the other girls’ hands. They danced in a circle around Ann, shouting, “Annie’s get-ting mar-ried! Annie’s get—”
Ann waved her arms at the five crazy dancing figures in oversize long underwear.
“Will you loons control yourselves and help me? I haven’t a wedding dress—we haven’t any place to spend a honeymoon—no ring—no refreshments—” Ann’s face changed. “Why, nobody’s even invited yet! Hey, kids, nobody even knows I’m getting married!”
From the adjoining barracks rooms on all sides came muffled shouts from the other flights.
“We know it! Think we’re deaf? Congratulations!”
“You’re making enough noise to wake up a dead man in Chicago! But we forgive you!”
“Are we invited to the wedding? Say yes!”
Ann, excited and flushed, shouted back with most unaccustomed lack of dignity. “’Course you’re invited! All of you! It’s this afternoon!”
The five assorted imps in long underwear burst into song and dance again, around the bride. Other sleepy nurses rushed in, too. Bedlam, itself, seemed to have broken loose in the barracks.
If Cherry had any secret sorrows about the trouble she was in, she drowned those sorrows in the girls’ mad scramble to arrange Ann’s wedding. First they put Ann to bed to rest. Then they went to call on the groom—shy Jack Powell, quiet and blue-eyed as Ann herself. Jack had wisely taken himself out of the way of these stampeding females. He had gone off to see the chaplain to ask him to officiate. Cherry left a note at Jack’s barracks, which all the nurses signed:
Here comes the groom,
Fresh to his doom—
Look at the crease
In his new pantaloon!
Next stop was a wedding gown for Ann. They held a hurri
ed consultation. “White—white—what the dickens around here is white?” Gwen puzzled.
“Bed sheets,” little Maggie supplied. “I saw a lovely new one in a ward supply closet the other day. It had a sheen like silk, ’cause it’s brand-new.”
Cherry looked at Aggie and Elsie. “Well, stylists? If I can wangle the sheet out of the ward, will you drape and tack it into a wedding gown for Ann?”
Aggie pretended to roll up her sleeves. “Just go get it, Ames!”
Elsie was already figuring. “If it’s regulation size, she can even have a train. A veil—a veil, kids—we have nothing but next summer’s mosquito netting—”
“Starch it and double it,” Gwen replied. “Make a short flyaway net veil. See? And over it, a crown of fresh flowers.”
“And a bouquet!” they chorused. “Ought to be white flowers.”
“I’ll go pick ’em,” Gwen volunteered. “Off the wards.” She put on her most demure expression, a sure sign she was up to mischief, and vanished in the direction of the hospital.
“Ann’s going to look like something by the grandest couturier or I’ll eat my medical kit,” Aggie Gray vowed. “C’mon, Elsie!” Off they went, too, to start on the bride’s veil.
“Food,” Cherry said to little Maggie. “You and me’re left—and left with that problem.”
“Food for the wedding guests,” Maggie echoed worriedly. “And then decorate the chapel. With what, though?”
“Fir boughs?” Cherry suggested vaguely. “And oh, yes! We must get that nurse from Flight Two to do Ann’s hair and nails.”
“Have you any chocolate bars? With almonds? To pay her with, I mean.”
When they hunted up the nurse, she delightedly refused any chocolate bars and dashed away to make the bride beautiful. Cherry and little Maggie hurried off to see the Mess Officer.
“What do you suppose we have here in Britain?” he said. “The same old thing you’ve been eating for weeks. Mutton.”
The two nurses groaned. Then Cherry observed: